Strangelights

I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve been invited to speak at the JAOO conference in Aarhus, Denmark, 28^th September till 3^rd October. I’ll speak on 1^st October and I’ll actually be at the conference 29^th September till 1^st October attending sessions. The title of my presentation is “Learning F# and the Functional Point of View” and you can see the full abstract here. I’m very pleased to have been invited to speak at conference were the other speakers include Martin Fowler, Anders Hejlsberg, and Erik Meijer, and I’m really looking forward to it. Feel free to drop me a line if you are attending too.

The first half of this series the accent is on immutable programming, because in the first part of the series we had an introduction to immutable data, and in this second part we’re going to look in depth at immutable programming possibilities, with the idea of show that this is actually not too different to what your used. Once we’ve conquered the immutability we’ll start to dig into the concurrency. The main idea behind this post is take a look at everything that makes working with immutable data bearable, even likable.

I will be 30 on Friday, I’m to celebrate this I going to say on the small meditation island of Ile de Port Cros. In an effort to break my chronic email addiction I’m not taking a laptop, so don’t expect the second part of Immutability and Concurrency till next week!

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La prochain réunion d’alt.net de Paris aura lieu mercredi 4 juin, 20h00 à le « Le Café des Initiés », 3, Place des Deux Ecus, 75001 Paris. Moi, Julien et Symon sera là, et vous ?

When asking the question how does functional programming help me with concurrent programming? The standard response tends to be functional programming use immutable data structures, read-only data structures can be shared between threads without issues, end of problem. Except it isn’t. Immutable data structures have a different set of problems associated with them when working on concurrent problems. This post will examine what these problems are, and then show that this is just a special case of a more general set of problems when working with immutable data structures. Finally will start taking a look at how we solve some of these problems, but in a single thread environment first of all.

Although the performance counters built into the CLR give you a pretty good handle on what’s going, there’s nothing quite like having your own counters to help you monitor your applications performance. There’s nothing quite like being able to see your own counters alongside the build in ones in perfmon. There are several things that make this a little tricky, first you must install your counter to make it visible to perfmon, then you need to create instances of the counters for the application to use, finally you need to remove your counters when there done with to ensure old instances don’t clog up the perfmon dialogs.

La première réunion a très bien passé, nous étions cinq, pas mal pour une réunion organisé en moins qu’une semaine. On s’est vu dans le « frog et rosbif », peut-être pas le meilleur choisi de lieu, normalement j’aime bien cette pub, mais ce soir là ils ont eu un match de foot à la télé et c’était trop bruyant. Donc, on a bu un verre d’hors de la pub et on est allé au « les têtes brûlées » juste à côté qui était plus calme et plus agréable.

About a week ago Rick Minerich made this blog post about an ant colony simulation in F#. I downloaded the code and played with it, I liked the simulation a lot but wasn’t too keen on the implementation – it used lots of thread and lots of mutable data. So I decided to dig around a tweak a little here and there, but before I knew it I’d rewritten the whole thing using immutable data structures. I also end up breaking the thing and having to mail Rick for help about why it was broken, anyway with a little help from him I managed to figure out the problem and finish the implementation.

Le mouvement alt.net s’agit de un groupe  des développeurs qui s’organisent eux-mêmes et qui sont intéressés par l’amélioration du processus de la création de logiciel. Ils sont intéressés par des outils .NET open source comme nunit, nant, et cruisecontrol.net mais surtout dans des techniques comme « agile », « test driven development », et « design patterns ».

I found a google wack!

Entering: verboseness repetitivity

Gives one site: http://lexsrv3.nlm.nih.gov/SPECIALIST/Projects/lexicon/2007/release/LEX/LRNOM